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Book Review: The Gluten Effect: How "Innocent" Wheat Is Ruining Your Health

Added on 28 Feb, 2011 by Helen Fletton.
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There are a lot of books on the market that are dedicated to gluten free
living, wheat allergies or intolerances and how to potentially live a
healthier life by removing grains from the diet. The problem comes from trying
to decide which books to buy and whether they will answer the questions that
you have.

HealthNOW sent us a copy for review of The Gluten Effect: How "Innocent"
Wheat Is Ruining Your Health by Drs. Vikki & Richard Petersen DC,
CCN and Founders of the HealthNOW Method .

The book is broken up into five sections:

Section One: Why all the sudden interest in gluten?
This section includes an intro to gluten sensitivity and how your immune
system works and why it reacts to gluten.

Section Two: Is gluten the hidden culprit behind your symptoms?
Including digestive problems and their relationship to gluten, it's effects on
your brain and nervous system and autoimmune diseases.

Section Four: Other gluten-related disorders including depression, weight
gain, fibromyalgia and memory loss
Looking at the various disorders that may be related to gluten.

Section Five: Finding and eliminating the cause Getting
diagnosed and being gluten free.

The book is written for the layperson e.g. you and me, the people who
don't have medical knowledge but do have gluten issues that they want
explained clearly and concisely. It also includes a useful glossary at the
back for some of the more tricky definitions.

One of the biggest problems with text books is that they are usually a sea
of black ink on paper with little white space to break up the monotony of
words. The Gluten Effect appears to have thought that through and
information is broken up into bite sized chunks each with a clear heading,
this makes dipping back into the book much easier for specific items you
might want to check out again.

Case studies are interspersed throughout the book, and some people may find
themselves identifying with those individuals. It may be like turning on the
light, all of a sudden other people also have those crazy sounding symptoms,
you're not going nuts after all.

So what did we think about the book overall? Well at wheat-free.org we have
absolutely no medical qualifications or background, but we have read a lot
about wheat allergies and gluten problems over the last 13 years.

We found the book interesting and there were things that we learnt from it
that we didn't previously know, so that was another bonus. A criticism would
be the title: The Gluten Effect: How "Innocent" Wheat Is Ruining
Your Health. Gluten is more than just wheat derived, there's also barley and
rye, the jury is still seesawing on oats. The title appears to
over-sensationalise the wheat aspect, as does the content, which may mislead
people slightly, especially those with celiac disease.

As with all books about medical issues care needs to be taken with
self-diagnosis. Read this book and learn about the issues affecting people
with gluten/wheat sensitivity, and if you think that it might just be what's
affecting you then don't hesitate to go to your physician armed with this
information.

Overall we liked the book so it's worth a read if you are suffering strange,
unexplained symptoms that your doctor simply brushes aside. Read this book and
you will learn some interesting facts that may have a beneficial impact on
improving your life if wheat/gluten is at the root of your problems. If you
have a better understanding of gluten sensitivity then you can make yourself
heard more clearly when you see your doctor.